What Is an Interactive Product Demo?

Buyers want to see a product before they talk to anyone about it. A video plays at the speed of the person who recorded it. A free trial asks for an account and a setup before anything useful appears.

For more on this topic, read Best Interactive Demo Software.

An interactive product demo is a short click-through of real screens from your product. The viewer clicks a highlighted spot on each screen to move to the next step, at their own pace, with no account and no install.

How an Interactive Demo Works

Each step of a demo is one screen with three parts.

• The screenshot. A capture of the product at that moment.
• A hotspot. The spot the viewer clicks to go on, usually the button you clicked when you recorded it.
• A callout. A short note beside the hotspot that says what is happening and why it matters.

The viewer reads the callout, clicks the hotspot and lands on the next step. Most demos also open with an intro card and close with an end card that points to a next step.

How a Demo Is Made in Proovyt

In Proovyt a demo starts as a recording in the Proovyt Capture Chrome extension.

1. Open Proovyt Capture on the tab you want to record and press Start recording.
2. Use your product as normal. Each click takes a screenshot and marks where you clicked.
3. Press Stop when the flow is done.
4. The editor opens on a new demo, with one step per click and a hotspot on each click.

A recording holds up to 200 steps. If you already have screenshots, drop, paste or pick the files in the editor and each one becomes a step. The extension only has access to the tab you choose to record and to the Proovyt app.

Editing What the Screenshot Says

A captured screen often shows something you do not want a buyer to see, such as a real customer's email or a test figure. In Proovyt you change that on the screenshot itself, on every plan.

You can also zoom a step up to 3x on the hotspot and apply one callout style to every step at once. The product tour shows each of these on a real demo.

Ways to Share a Demo

A finished demo leaves Proovyt in one of three ways.

• Hosted link. A public page for the demo. Republishing keeps the link, and unpublishing takes the page down at once.
• Embed. A snippet for your site, your docs or your help center.
• Owned export. One self-contained HTML file that plays in any browser, which you can host wherever you like.

Publishing copies only the screenshots the demo uses, with blur baked in. The rest of your workspace stays private. The pricing page lists which plans include each option.

Measuring a Demo

For hosted links and embeds, Proovyt reports views, unique viewers, completion rate and drop-off by step. Drop-off by step shows the screen where viewers stop, which is usually the step to shorten or rewrite.

Hosted pages and embeds set no cookies. Analytics store no IP addresses, and unique viewers come from a hash that changes every day. Known bots are filtered out of the counts.

What an Interactive Demo Is Not

An interactive demo made in Proovyt is a sequence of screenshots. It is not a copy of your app.

• It is not a sandbox. There is no cloned copy of your app for viewers to explore on their own.
• It does not branch yet. A demo plays in one order.
• It has no generated narration or video.

HTML capture, in beta, also records the page itself next to each screenshot, so a step stays sharp at any zoom. The pricing page shows which plans include it.